Eurogamer.net - Lost Humanity 18- A Table of Doritos.Standards are important. They are hard to live up to, sure, but that's the point of them. The trouble with games journalism is that there are no standards. We expect to see Geoff Keighley sitting beside a table of s***. We expect to see the flurry of excitement when the GMAs get announced, instead of a chuckle and a roll of the eyes. We expect to see our games journos failing to get what journalistic integrity means. The brilliant writers, like John Walker for example, don't get the credit they deserve simply because they don't play the game. Indeed, John Walker gets told to get off his pedestal because he has high standards and is pointing out a worrying problem.

These are hard questions and they don’t have simple answers, but they’re important questions to ask.

John Walker's Electronic House - An Utter Disgrace.And what the above proves is not only just how moronic UK libel laws are, where someone can’t directly quote a person and then point out possible misinterpretations that could arise from it, but also how deftly our broken system can be used to silence not only discussion, but also criticism.

When a journalist feels they have been misrepresented, even if this so-called misrepresentation has arisen from their having been directly quoted, the response should not be to demand it be removed. The response is to offer to write a response column, or to publish a response in any of the public outlets to which they have access. To do anything else is to be an enemy of journalism, deliberately stifling discussion, and going out of one’s way to ensure further discussion is feared.

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Cutter wrote on Oct 25, 2012, 20:50:Most journalists - even the real professional ones - are only a slight step above vulture IMO. The games journalist has never been a real journalist, per se. Giving your opinion on a game is a long way off from Woodward and Bernstein blowing up Watergate on Nixon and pals. Seeing as we all know how advertising has driven "reviews" over the years why should any of this come as a surprise?

It doesn't, at least not to anyone who's been following gaming "journalism" for the past eight years or so. What's more troubling is that in the UK you can apparently not like something someone says, even if it's a direct quote, simply threaten a libel lawsuit, and get a (fairly major) site like Eurogamer to simply buckle and withdraw the "offending" content.

(Hey, British people, sit there and bitch about how fucked up the US is some more )

But I very much agree with your statement that gaming journalism is not journalism. At most it's glorified blogging. Fortunately, there are a few 'games journalists' still worth reading, and who will give you an unbiased opinion, but they are becoming a rare breed. The rest of them are just marketoids-for-hire. Most of them calls themselves freelance journalists. Well, they have the freelance part right. I'd say that the words "publisher cheerleader" would fit better than the word "journalist" though.

Anyway, Lauren Wainwright is a bitch (I'll forego using the more appropriate C word here), and is OBVIOUSLY a paid fucking shill. Her pathetic removal of Square Enix as an employer from her journalisted entry is just icing on the cake. What a moron.

And if you don't like me saying that, Lauren Wainwright, kindly go fuck yourself. Or whine to your PR buddies at Square about it.